Cat’s Claws had joined several hundred other troops lined up on one of five gantry ledges as the bubbles trundled past in stop-start sequences. Along with the rest of them, Morton had finally been given the activation codes for the aggressor systems wetwired into his body. Now the squad were all making nervous, jokey comments about those systems not firing outward, war tourism, which body parts you protected above all else, alien rights lawyers suing them, and other stupid stuff. Trying to bull out the wait.
After a surprisingly short time Cat’s Claws was at the head of the line. Morton pulled his armor suit helmet down, checked his breathing circuit integrity, and slithered through the slit in the side of his bubble. As soon as the straps closed around him, the gel was pumped in under pressure. His e-butler integrated itself with the bubble’s array, confirming internal systems functionality. By then he was already ten meters down the conveyor rack.
The Elan strategic assault display flashed up across his virtual vision. He saw batches of wormholes opening a hundred kilometers above the planetary surface. They would remain in place for several seconds, disgorging a phenomenal quantity of munitions: missiles, ground-attack warheads, electronic warfare pods, decoy vehicles, beam-weapons platforms. It was all covering fire, a diversion while other, smaller wormholes opened just above the surface, deploying squads all around the fringes of Prime installations and bases. The Primes were fighting back, sending up flyers and big ships, their beam weapons punching through the scuzzy continent-wide clouds to intercept the rain of lethal machines as they sank down through the ionosphere. There were also flyers scouring the ground as the troop wormholes flipped in and out of existence. But electronic warfare aerobots were causing havoc with the Prime communications and sensors, hampering the flyers. Initial reports indicated that the landings were succeeding, by which the navy meant beachhead casualties were under thirty percent.
Morton hit the ground. The impact wasn’t as bad as any of the bone-buster hits they’d given him in training. His bubble bounced twice, the plyplastic flexing and bending to dissipate as much of the shock as it could; pressure waves moved sluggishly through the gel to squish lightly up against him. On the third landing, it sagged like a punctured balloon and stayed on the ground. “Down,” he told the rest of Cat’s Claws.
According to the inertial navigation readout, he was within half a kilometer of his predicted landing coordinate. The land immediately around him was flat, a field that had been seeded in springtime and had run rampant before starting to decay. Some kind of bean crop, judging by the yellow-green mush pressing against the lower section of his bubble. Abrupt climate change hadn’t helped this land’s recent delicate conversion to cultivation. It was raining in the Highmarsh; a thick blanket of dark turbulent cloud was stretched across the roof of the valley, flowing slowly from east to west. It produced a constant downpour of gray water that had overwhelmed the drainage dikes and beaten the surviving crops into a straggly mat of insipid green stalks lying flat against the sodden soil. Tall liipoplar trees that had been planted in long lines up and down the valley had been battered by the nuclear blast and subsequent storms, few of them were still intact; the majority had snapped to crash over the roads they once marked.
Morton checked around, and found the mountain he was supposed to be heading for, three kilometers away. The bubble started to stiffen up again, reverting to its standard spherical configuration. His virtual hands zipped over a sequence of control icons, and the single broad caterpillar track running around the compact machine’s vertical equator began to spin up. The bubble began its stabilized counterspin, keeping him perfectly level. Dips and lumps in the ground jounced him from side to side, but in the main it was a smooth ride, the gel acting as the ultimate suspension system.
External sensors showed Morton water spraying out from either side of the track. A rigid trail of squashed muddy plants lay behind him. “Goddamn!”
The bubble’s chromometic skin was doing a wonderful job defusing the moldy green color of the crop around the entire exterior. Any eye or visual sensor looking down would just see a hazy patch just the same color as the rest of the field; but that crushed track and little wake of water was a dead giveaway.
“We need to get on the farm roads,” he told the others. “This wet ground is painting us as big fat targets.” Pre-invasion map images flipped up in his virtual vision, and he steered the bubble to the right, his body tilting over as if he were riding a bike. The bubble changed direction, heading for the top corner of the field.
“Incoming,” Doc Roberts warned. “Four flyers.”
Morton saw the symbols creep into his virtual vision. They’d come into the valley at the western end, following the old highway route around Blackwater Crag.
Aerobots curved around to meet them head-on. Maser beams slashed between the two opposing formations, etching themselves in lines of steam through the downpour. Force fields flared brightly as they deflected the energy strikes. The aerobots fired salvos of missiles, their fiery contrails spluttering in the rain. Powerful ion bolts ripped through the air like slow-motion lightning, casting stark shadows for kilometers across the ground below.
Morton reached the rough farm track bordering the field. It was awash with muddy water that was spilling over the banks of the dike, but only a few centimeters thick. He throttled up the bubble’s track. A limp fantail of water squirted up behind him as his speed reached an easy eighty kph.
Tactical decision: that the aliens in their flyers would be a little preoccupied to spot a ripple in the mud right now.
The aerobots were always going to lose. They were outnumbered from the start. The flyers were heavier and slower, but their beam weapons had a much higher power level. Maneuverability and superior tactical ability gave the first two kills to the aerobots and their host of submunitions, but eventually brute force won out.
After seven minutes of furious combat the remaining two flyers thundered over the area where the wormhole had opened. One of the stubby cylinders was trailing a thin brown vapor trail from a gash on its side, but its straining engines managed to keep it airborne. They began to spiral out, sensors sweeping the ground.
Ten kilometers away, and already three hundred meters above the valley floor in the rugged folds of the foothills, Morton watched the aliens circling around and around. His bubble was stationary, resting at the bottom of a narrow gully cut out of the soil by an earlier spring storm. Mud and stones were pressed against the base, their mottled shading replicated all around him. A web of thermal shunt fibers completed the disguise, giving the bubble’s chromometic skin the same temperature as the land it rested on.
“Bugger,” Rob Tanne said. “Eight more of the bastards.”
The new flyers raced up the Highmarsh Valley to join the first two in the search for any surviving human trespasser. Their flight paths brought them closer and closer to the foothills.
“Don’t they have anything else to do?” Parker complained.
“Guess not,” Morton said.
Cat’s Claws waited as the flyers swooped low overhead, their bubbles inert, operating on low power mode, hidden among the abundant secluded folds and hollows provided by the rugged landscape. Morton could hear the bass thrumming of the engines through the bubble’s gel. They must be very loud out in the open.
One passed about fifty meters away. His bubble’s passive sensors scanned the layout. There wasn’t much to add to the database already in his array. The Primes didn’t seem to vary their machines.